


oh well, you've got me under your spell

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Best friend's brother, F/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 20:32:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12733806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Clarke is sophomore class president, assistant copy editor on the school paper, and a member of the debate team.Bellamy is her best friend's tough, troublesome, protective older brother.They barely even know each other. And yet for some reason he keeps showing up at her house.Chapter One:A part of her wonders if something will change, if something new will begin, now that she's cringed her way through Nightmare on Elm Street with Bellamy, and watched him fall asleep on her couch. But it doesn't.





	oh well, you've got me under your spell

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: "This is the last time I’m letting you into my house" requested (indirectly) by loreley02 on tumblr.
> 
> Title is from "Hold" by Saves the Day.

Clarke is in her living room, two-thirds of the way through a horror movie marathon with Raven and Octavia, when a knock sounds on the front door and she almost jumps out of her skin.    

It's past midnight, her parents are asleep, and all the lights in the house are off. Octavia's response—"What the fuck? What was that?"—is a fair one. So is Raven's: "Should I get a kitchen knife?" And so is the beating of Clarke's heart and the chill that runs down her spine as, silently and slowly on bare feet, she leads the trio of them down the front hall and to the door.   

"Who is it?" Octavia whispers, when Clarke leans up on her toes to look out through the peephole. "Axe murderer? Serial killer?"   

"Close." Clarke breathes out a long, relieved sigh as she settles down on her feet again. Then she starts to unlock the door. "It's your brother."   

Any comfort Clarke felt at learning she was not about to die at the hands of a chainsaw-wielding psycho melts away, though, when Raven hits the light switch and she gets a look at Bellamy's face. There's a bad bruise already starting to purple around his eye, his mouth is bloody, and his hands are even worse. His shirt is torn. He sways back a little bit too hard when Octavia jumps forward and wraps her arms around him.   

"Did you know your phone is off?" he asks her. His voice is gruff, parched with exertion and stress, but Octavia doesn't seem to notice. She just holds him out at arm's length, scanning over his face to catalogue every cut and every sign of blood.    

"Bellamy, what happened?" Clarke asks instead, and then Octavia's eyes snap to meet his and she asks, "Did mom's new boyfriend do this?"   

"What? No—no," Bellamy insists, a hard warning on the last word. "I was out, and I got into a fight. It's not a big deal but mom _can't_ know."   

Clarke rolls her eyes when she hears that it's _not a big deal_ and steps a little closer, her arms crossed tight against her chest. "There's obviously more to the story than that—"   

"No there isn't—"   

"Clarke, just _don't_ right now, okay?"   

"Guys, hey."   

Octavia's voice was all plea, but the look on her face had as much warning in it as her brother's words did a moment before, and Clarke feels a defensive anger, made all the worse by how bone-deep worried and honestly, secretly _scared_ she is, starting to boil to the surface—all of which is sure to make the situation escalate at top speed. It's only Raven's sudden re-appearance in the hallway that cuts the growing argument off at the head. She's holding up a bag of frozen peas, wrapped in a dishtowel, and staring at them with a combination of surprise, concern, and judgement that puts Clarke utterly to shame.   

"I know Abby has a real first aid kit around here somewhere," she says, "but I improvised this for your eye, just to start."   

She holds the peas out, but it takes several long moments before anyone thinks to take them. And then it's Clarke, at last, who steps forward and passes them off to Bellamy. He winces as he presses the misshapen cold bag to his cheekbone. It's weird, but not that weird, that Clarke didn't even notice Raven stepping out into the kitchen. And it's weird that Bellamy, under the single hallway light, looks so worn and exhausted, so secretly fragile, and maybe a little scared, too.   

But not that weird.   

"Clarke will fix you up," Octavia promises, slinging her arm through his and leaning against his shoulder. "And I won't tell mom anything, I swear."   

She still has questions, too many of them, crowding in her mouth, jostling together in her brain, but all Clarke does is nod. Yes, of course. She'll fix him right up.    

The first aid kit is in the downstairs bathroom, tucked in under the sink, and even though the room is just a tiny half-bath, not even the edge of a tub to perch on, they all crowd inside anyway: Bellamy seated on the closed toilet lid while Clarke kneels in front of him and Raven and Octavia stand awkwardly against the walls. Raven had the presence of mind, at least, to turn off the hallway light, so now the house is dark again. No need to alert any parents here.   

The light in the bathroom seems that much brighter, though, in contrast: a hard antiseptic yellow bouncing off the tile. Clarke can see too well every break in Bellamy's skin, every new lilac-colored bruise just beginning to deepen to purple and blue. His hands are in worse shape than his face, which she supposes means he gave worse than he got. But she's not really up for offering him any congratulations. For a long time, she doesn't say anything at all. None of them do, still scared perhaps, or still too tense, although Bellamy sucks in a sharp breath every now and then through his teeth, as Clarke cleans and disinfects his cuts and scrapes. "Just another minute," she murmurs, as she watches herself as if from far away, watches her hands that look like someone else's hands, caring for him with such caution and such gentleness.  

*   

Clarke doesn't have any classes with Bellamy—sophomores and seniors rarely do—so there's no clear opportunity to ask him, on Monday, how he's doing. Even if she did get a chance, it would probably be an awkward conversation. Very awkward. They aren't really friends: he's Octavia's tough, troublesome, protective older brother, and he keeps mostly to himself, except for a small crew of equally tough and taciturn senior boys, the kids he sits with at lunch and hangs out with, sometimes, in the parking lot after school. Clarke is sophomore class president, assistant copy editor on the school paper, and in September she joined the debate team, too; as far as she can tell, she and Bellamy don't have much in common.   

But then he and Octavia—adventurous, outgoing, fearless Octavia—don't seem to have much in common either, and they're the closest siblings Clarke has ever met.   

It's Octavia that Clarke approaches instead to ask how Bellamy is holding up.   

"Oh, he'll live," she answers lightly. She looks away at the same moment, though, trying to hide the worry that's edged into her expression, then shuts her locker with a particularly decisive snap. "It's really not as bad as it looks."   

"Did he tell you what happened?"   

Octavia's brow furrows, and she hunches her shoulders almost imperceptibly up. Clarke knows that expression and that posture, part defensive, part secretive, just a little bit accusatory: a _who do you think **you** are?_ look. They're friends, for sure, but Blake family privacy is Blake family privacy.   

"Not much," she answers. "Just that he got into some dumbass fight. He's not _proud_ that he keeps getting into this shit, he just—he's always gotta defend somebody's honor, you know."   

Clarke does not know. This feels like the beginning of a story, not the end, but as they duck into first period French, Octavia pivots away from anything that could be described as _saying too much_. "Look, he's really grateful, you know. That you let him stay over on Saturday."   

Clarke shrugs as she slides into her seat. "It wasn't a big deal. He left before my parents woke up, that would have been the only awkward part." It wasn't like she had a choice in the matter, as far as she can tell. He pretty clearly couldn't go home, and she wasn't about to send him off to sleep on the street.   

Octavia shakes her head. "No," she insists, "it was. Seriously. It was a really big deal."   

*

A part of her wonders if something will change, if something new will begin, now that she's cringed her way through _Nightmare on Elm Street_ with Bellamy, and watched him fall asleep on her couch. But it doesn't. He waves to her once, in the hallway by the cafeteria, and on Friday he drives her, Octavia, and Raven to the mall, but that's it. She notices that his hand's still bandaged, even six days later, though not as well as when she wrapped it up herself on Saturday night. It doesn't look tight enough. She considers offering to fix it for him, then decides against. She decides to just stop thinking about him, in general.   

On Wednesday afternoon, she has the house to herself, and outside the most beautiful bright-sky fall-breeze weather they've had this season yet. She takes her American Lit reading out to the deck. She kicks off her shoes and kicks up her feet. The trees that form a gentle border between her yard and the Jahas' sway in a particularly invigorating gust of wind, echoing a vast fluttering of leaves that seems to fill the entire sky with sound.    

Clarke shivers, the sort of ghostly, top-down frisson that always seems to lead to a clearer head, then sets her book down on the table and walks back inside, still barefoot, to grab a sweater.    

On her way back across the kitchen, she stares mostly down at her feet. There's a spot of last summer's hot pink nail polish still clinging to her big toe, and she's wondering idly how long it will last. It's from this dreamy reverie that she's shaken, rudely, by a loud banging on the sliding glass door.    

Her gaze shoots up. Bellamy Blake is standing on her deck, holding up _The Sound and the Fury_ and pointing at it.    

When she regains her breath, and the normal rhythm of her heart asserts itself again, she crosses the last few feet between them and slides back the door. Then she slips outside and closes it again behind her. This is the second time in as many weeks that he’s shown up at her house while she’s wearing soft pajama pants, but at least this time she's wearing a neutral t-shirt on top, not the ancient Camp Polis tee she wears to bed. That's something.    

"I caught this blowing across the yard," Bellamy says, right at the same moment she finally manages to ask:    

"What are you doing here?"    

It's a blunt question, sounds even more brusque than she'd intended, and she feels a blush blooming across her cheeks as she takes the book from him. "Thanks. I guess I should have weighted it down."    

Bellamy smiles, an expression just a little too friendly to be properly called a _smirk_ , and answers, "Good thing I was passing by."    

He says it as if finding him strolling through her backyard were as normal as running into a neighbor on the sidewalk. Except that that's the thing. It’s _not_ normal. 

It was startling to see Bellamy stumble through her door in the middle of the night, frightening to see his torn shirt and the swelling around his eye—but somehow it wasn't as weird as this. She'd been distracted by a sense of emergency and a need to get things done. No opportunity at all to notice the way the muscles in his arm flexed or the remnants of summer-sharpened freckles on his cheeks. And no need to wonder what had brought him to the Griffins': he'd been looking for Octavia; he'd gone to where he'd known she would be. But this is Clarke's backyard, bordered on three sides by her neighbors' yards and on the fourth by her house itself. And now Bellamy's just standing in it, out of nowhere, out of the ether itself.    

"Octavia's not here," she says abruptly, and immediately wishes she hadn't. There's no good way to hold her arms, and no good place to look. Bellamy's staring at her as if she’d just announced, out of nowhere, that the aliens were coming.   

"I know," he answers slowly. "She's on a trail somewhere with the Mountain Biking Club." He says the words like they're a foreign language, like spikes in his mouth. Clarke detects a barely suppressed eye roll at the word _club_. "I was taking a short cut from your boyfriend's house over there."   

For a second, Clarke has no idea what he means. Then: "You mean Wells?" she asks, not sure if Bellamy was joking or teasing—he didn't sound like it, and acquaintances don't usually _tease_ —or if he really thinks she and her oldest friend are a thing. "He's not my boyfriend," she clarifies, just in case. "We're just friends."   

"Okay," Bellamy answers lightly: if it was a mistake, it's obviously not one he feels embarrassed about making. He drags over another chair and sits down at the same table where Clarke was reading a few minutes before, dropping his backpack down to the deck next to him. "Can you do me a favor, Griffin?"   

"Depends on the favor." She still feels rattled; he's so controlled and confident, and she feels on such poor footing with him, even in her own yard. But she doesn’t want any of that to show. So she pushes back her shoulders and tilts up her chin, infuses her voice with the sort of inflated confidence she uses at debate team tournaments and hopes that he'll mistake it for genuine control.   

He pulls out a French textbook from his bag, holds it up, and asks, "Can I study here for a little bit?"   

As far as favors for Bellamy Blake go, it's not exactly what she was expecting. And yet—there's nothing _wrong_ with him studying here.   

"Okay. Sure." She sits down again herself, sets her copy of Faulkner on the tabletop with her hands resting on top of it, primly.   

Maybe she sounded wary, because he starts to explain: "Usually I'd go to the library, but it's out of my way from here, and if I go home—"   

"Bellamy." She waits for him to look up at her, then offers a tentative smile. "I don’t need an explanation. Just read your book."   

He smiles back, that same not-quite-grin, surprisingly fond. "Okay. Good. Thanks."   

Clarke opens her book again and tells herself quite sternly and quite forcefully that she is going to pay attention to what she's reading. The day is still picture-perfect lovely; the breeze, when it ghosts by them, still refreshing and crisp. Just like before.   

She can't help but find it hard to concentrate on Quentin, though, when Bellamy is sitting right next to her, eyebrows scrunched over his nose as he works out a translation, so lost in what he's doing that he can't possibly notice the way she's watching him. His handwriting is all big, blocky letters, which is somehow exactly what she would have guessed. Occasionally, he mouths a few words silently to himself. Like he's really into it.   

"So what were you doing at Wells' house?" she asks, when she just can't pretend to care about the Compson family anymore.   

It's not a great conversation starter, probably, and Bellamy shoots a look up at her that's part surprise and part pure annoyance. "Working on a U.S. History project," he answers, after a moment.   

"Oh—I didn't know you were in A.P. History." She knew Wells was, and he told her about the class sometimes in passing, but not much about who else was in it. She means her comment to come off as curious and friendly, surprised perhaps but only in an inoffensive way, as if by some trivial coincidence. But Bellamy's expression darkens as if she'd just accused him of lying or cheating, of being somewhere he doesn't belong.   

He huffs and picks up his pen again. "Funny, I thought my sister shared the details of my class schedule with all of her friends." He scratches out a few more words. Then, apparently unable to stop himself, he adds, "What did you think I was doing over there? Breaking into the Mayor's house?" He scoffs, hard, and rolls his eyes. "In the middle of the _day_?"  

Clarke wants to scoff right back at him, to show him that she gets the joke and, on top of that, it isn't funny, but the sound gets caught against the inside of her throat. Because—it is a joke. Definitely. Probably. Unless it's something more like a confession, because Bellamy is the sort of boy who gets into mysterious fights—real bloody fist fights, not just the yelling sort—and knowing that means knowing there is so much about him that's still a mystery. Maybe he _has_ broken into a house. The way he said _Mayor_ , she can tell he's not a big fan of Wells's dad.  

"And here I thought everyone knew that burglary was strictly an after-dark activity," he says, into the pause where her answer should have gone. He's shaking his head, already hunched over his work again, not looking at her.  

Clarke's face is burning, and not even the cool fall breeze can help her. She stares down at her book and the pattern the paragraphs make on the page. She thinks about how Octavia's brother can be sort of a dick sometimes.  

She could just shake a stick and tell him to get off her lawn, since she was just trying to be nice, and she definitely doesn't _have_ to be nice. Except that the longer she looks at him, mumbling French to himself every now and then as he writes, scratching at the back of his head with the same hand that holds his pen, the less annoyed she feels. Also, he did let her hide her face in his shoulder, briefly, semi-accidentally, after a particularly heart-stopping jump scare during _Nightmare on Elm Street_ , and he didn't make fun of her after, even though it was a terribly embarrassing thing to do, so she knows he isn't _always_ a dick.  

She waits until it looks like he's done with the passage he's working on, and then asks, with an aggressive amount of cheer, "So do you like the class? A.P. U.S.?"  

"What?"   

He doesn't seem annoyed, when he looks up at her; more like surprised, as if he'd forgotten for a second where he was, why she was there.   

"A.P. U.S History," she repeats. "Do you—"  

"Yeah." He glances away from her, out toward the grass and the tree line. "It's a good class. I liked World History better, even though Sydney's kinda..." He makes a face and an equivocating gesture. "Out there. But Kane's really good. Tough. Doesn't let people get away with saying dumb shit." The corner of his mouth quirks up, the memory of some private joke ghosting across his face.  

"I'm thinking of taking it next year," Clarke offers, and Bellamy's attention snaps back to her. Perhaps she's just imagining things, but it seems as if his expression softens in some slight, almost imperceptible way.  

(Even if so, she has no idea what that means.)  

What he says is, "You should"—still inscrutable, but encouraging.   

Then he asks her what she's taking this year, and she starts telling him about her U.S. Government class and the debate project they just started, how she's not sure what topic she'll choose yet but she's already looking forward to kicking some rhetorical ass. That's how he gets to recounting his own epic sophomore year debate against Anya Woods. How, a few minutes later, Clarke stops holding open the page in her book. How they keep talking until the chill of approaching evening makes Clarke shiver even in her sweater, and Bellamy says he has to go. 

* 

Raven sits down on the edge of the track, spread her legs out in front of her in a wide _v_ , and slowly starts to fold her body in two.  

Meanwhile Clarke’s version of stretching is hopping around on one foot while she pulls the other leg up behind her and tries not to fall on her ass. She wouldn’t say that she’s out of shape, exactly, but rather that Raven has found a completely new meaning for the word _shape_. And Clarke’s not jealous, but she is entranced as she watches Raven’s fingertips inch forward across the rubber.  

“So he really just showed up outside your house, without any warning?” Raven asks, as she comes up for air and then starts reaching for the toes of her right foot. Clarke can’t see her face, but she’s sure there’s a raised eyebrow or two in Raven’s expression. “Okay… That isn’t _incredibly creepy_ at all.”  

“I told you, he was working on a project with Wells,” Clarke answers. She tries to convey with her tone how bored she is with this subject, which is difficult, because of all the things Bellamy does, bore her is not one.   

 “And did you verify that story?”  

She did. She texted Wells that night and told him about her strange encounter, which is how she knows the history project was real, and so was the meet up at the Jahas’, and also how she knows that Wells had no idea Bellamy would be taking a short cut through the Griffins’ backyard. But she feigns surprise and a small dash of shock. “Why would I do that?”  

“Because.” Raven sits up straight again, her pony tail swishing back behind her in punctuation. “I love Octavia, and I know she loves her brother. But Bellamy is bad news. Just look at who he hangs out with.” She gestures out in front of her, as if the whole gang were standing right there on the track. “Miller would probably be in juvie right now if he wasn’t the police chief’s son. And Murphy—he’s basically an arsonist.” 

Clarke rolls her eyes, letting go of her ankle so it falls with a too-hard _thump_ on the track. "That's just a rumor." And it is; it's no more than a scrap of high school gossip free-floating through the halls, one that Raven's picked up as if she were tuning through static on the radio. She's probably never had a conversation with John Murphy in her life. But she's reaching for the toes of her left foot now and hardly even seems to have heard Clarke's response. 

"Anyway, we're talking about Bellamy, not his friends," Clarke adds, this time with more bite. "And he's not a criminal." 

"Are you sure about that?" Raven jumps to her feet easily, bouncing with restless energy on the heels of her sneakers. "Like—" She stretches her arms high up over her head. "Really sure?" 

"Yes." She crosses her arms tight against her chest and tilts up her chin. "Does Octavia know you think her brother is headed for a jail cell?" 

Raven shoots her a look that says _don't be ridiculous_ , a drive-by look as she starts to stretch her arms out to either side, twisting her torso first to the right, then the left. "All I'm saying is—speak of the devil." 

"What?" 

The question forms faint on Clarke's tongue, then fades away as she turns, searching out the spot over her shoulder that has caught Raven's attention. Then she sees them: Bellamy and Miller climbing up the bleachers at the edge of the field. They settle on a step about halfway up, Bellamy leaning back with his elbows on the bench behind him, Miller leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. 

"Guess they don't have anything better to do than voyeur on seventh period gym," Raven says. Her voice sounds like it's coming from miles away. 

It's not unusual for seniors with a spare to show up in other grades' gym classes, joining in on freshman dodgeball or providing imbalance to underclassmen basketball teams, but five weeks into the school year and Clarke has never seen Bellamy crash her class before. Not that it means anything. He and Miller aren't even looking her way, but seem to be providing commentary on a touch football game some of the boys are organizing over by the far goal post. Still, she finds herself watching them for a long time: the bends in Bellamy's knees, the way he tilts back his head, how he nudges his shoulder against Miller's, and looks, even from a distance, like he's grinning. 

"Clarke. Clarke Griffin! Earth to Griffin!" Raven gives her a nudge of her own, then bounces out in front of her and waves until the world snaps back into place. Clarke shakes her head like she's shaking off a bad dream. "Are we going for a run," Raven asks, "or what?" 

"We are, we are." She turns her back on the bleachers and stares ahead at the long curve of track sweeping off to the left. "Sorry. I was just...thinking about something." 

"Thinking about Octavia's brother," Raven corrects. Her voice isn't teasing or accusatory, only matter of fact. But her expression is sympathetic, about as soft as Raven's expressions ever get. 

"I just wasn't expecting him. Like you said—speak of the devil." 

Raven takes the hint. "Right." She huffs out a short breath, and the look of gentle understanding fades. "Some devil, huh?" Then she counts them down and they set off, creating a clatter of off-beat footsteps against the track.

Raven is faster than Clarke by far, and by the time they've rounded the corner onto the far side of the track, she's allowed herself to pull considerably ahead. Clarke doesn't mind. Running during gym class isn't exactly solitary, but if she looks mostly ahead or at the woods creeping up at her right side, she can almost pretend she's alone with her thoughts. 

Then when she makes it all the way even with the bleachers, she accidentally looks up. Bellamy and Miller are still there, of course, Miller still watching the football game—and Bellamy watching her. He catches her eye. Then he raises his hand in a lazy version of a wave and smiles at her, or half-smiles, which catches her so off-guard that she almost forgets to wave back. But it hardly matters anyway, because she's still running, and the moment is little more than that, and soon she's passing him by again. 

*

Bellamy and Miller show up to her next three gym classes and then, on Wednesday, Bellamy's somehow next to her in the cafeteria line. She notices him because he's leaning forward into her space. But when she looks at him—an accusatory look, which she's planning to pair with some withering remark about how he doesn't have to _shove_ , there are enough chocolate chip cookies for everyone—he just catches her eye and smiles at her. One of those stupid, disarming smiles. Like he'd just happened to notice her there hiding beneath his elbow, but now that he sees her, he's pleased. 

"Hey, Griffin, have you seen O?" 

"Um—no." She makes a last-minute switch from _withering_ to _nonchalant_ , and grabs for a banana to crowd in along the edge of her tray. "She has geometry before lunch. Up on the third floor. She's probably not down yet." 

"Right. Yeah." He sounds like he's trying to pretend he already knew this. Clarke watches him pick up an apple and examine it for bruises. 

"Did you...want me to give her a message?" 

"What?" He looks up a bit too sharply, like he'd already forgotten she was there. Or was trying to look like he'd forgotten. "No. It's fine, thanks." 

O…kay. Not weird at all. Clarke takes in a sharp breath to distract herself from saying something dumb, and keeps busy grabbing a carton of milk and pulling her ID card from her pocket to pay. The food line is a bit claustrophobic on good days but today she almost bursts open her lungs taking a deep breath once she finally reaches the cafeteria proper. All she can think is that that conversation was very awkward, and she cannot place her finger on exactly why. 

She sits down at her usual spot, across from Raven and with her back to the courtyard windows, and announces without thinking, "Octavia's brother is weird." 

"That's an understatement," Octavia's voice answers from behind her. She jumps up onto the bench and then, in the same movement, slips in easily next to Clarke. "What weirdness has he committed this time?" 

"Nothing. He was just...asking about you, and then he wasn't?" 

"He was making up excuses to talk to you," Raven notes wisely. 

"What? No, he wasn't," Clarke answers, at the same time as Octavia pulls a face and asks: 

"Are you suggesting that my brother is interested in Clarke?" 

Raven shrugs. "I'm just saying that boys aren't that complicated." 

"No offense to Clarke, but Bell's got kind of a type. Also—they barely know each other." 

"Well, there _was_ that time at her house..." 

"Sleepover night?" Octavia groans, an exaggerated growl, props her elbows on the table and shoves her fingers through her hair. "Do we _have_ to keep talking about that?" 

"No, I mean—" 

"Guys." Clarke looks up from fiddling with the top of her milk carton, points her gaze first at Raven and then at Octavia as if she were no more than a neutral moderator here. "It was just a joke. We've had, like, three conversations. Ever." 

Raven looks like she's about to argue, but something in the glare Clarke shoots her stops her short. So she asks instead about the day's cafeteria options, while Octavia shows interest in Clarke's pepperoni pizza slice, and on the other side of the room, one of Bellamy's friends tells a joke that sets the whole table off with laughter. There's a brown-haired girl sitting next to him, leaning on his shoulder, maybe flirting. Probably flirting. Bellamy picks up his apple and takes a big, crunching bite out of the side, and finally, Clarke forces herself to look away. 

*

After her shower, Clarke closes the door to her bedroom and opens her window, just a crack, to let in the cool air of a perfect early autumn evening. She slips out of her robe and into her pajamas and carefully towel dries her hair. Outside, the backyard is pitch black, out of reach of the sidewalk street lamps and the front porch light, and a chorus of crickets chirps a pleasant rhythm. 

It's not exactly a wild Friday night, but she'll take it. 

She settles down into bed with her book, not Faulkner this time, but a sci fi adventure she's reading for herself, and prepares to leave Earth behind for an hour or two at least. 

It's a plan that is unfolding completely with a hitch, until her phone buzzes. 

"Ugh, what do you want?" she groans at it, as she rolls over onto her back and flails an arm out toward her bedside table. She holds her phone above her face to read it, gripping it one handed as she uses the fingers of her other hand to mark her place, somewhere around the first glimpse of the enemy spaceship. 

The message is from an unknown number and reads: _would it b a bad idea to climb your trellis?_   

Clarke frowns up at it, not sure if she should be scared or just confused. Probably, objectively, she should be scared. But then it's most likely just a wrong number, and between her parents down the hall and her neighbors on all sides, she's not exactly in fear for her life. So she settles on a combination of baffled and slightly uneasy. 

Still she finds herself glancing out the window at the pure black of the backyard, listening carefully for unusual sounds disturbing the cricket-song. 

Another text follows: _this is bellamy by the way I got your number from o_. 

Clarke blinks up at the screen, for a long moment simply uncomprehending, Bellamy’s name echoing over and over in her mind. _Bellamy?_ —impossible. Impossible, there’s been a mistake. Her fingers hover over the screen but her brain's short-circuited on any sort of reply. All she can think is _Bellamy is texting me_ and _Bellamy might be outside my house_ and these sentences make so little sense that she might as well be speaking in code to herself, round and round in an endless loop: sending herself scrambled messages and then tripping over herself to translate them. 

She's just started to type out _where are you?_ (because she still can't believe he's actually in her yard, right now, at this very moment) when a banging sound startles her. It's as if a strong gust of wind had slammed a loose shutter against the side of the house. Except that there is no wind, and the sound was coming from below. 

Clarke scrambles off the bed, phone still in hand, and throws herself against the windowsill. Her window's only barely open, so she shoves it up all the way, wood scraping against wood with a harsh _thwick_ of sound, and sticks her head outside. She can barely see a thing. The light of a quarter moon illuminates only the dark outlines of towering trees above and, below, the vague shadow-suggestion of the deck off to the side and then a sea of inscrutable shadow. She hears the banging sound again and then, as her eyes slowly adjust, she makes him out. A figure down in the grass, pulling at the trellis that leads right up past her window. 

"Don't," Clarke hisses down at him, but he doesn't seem to hear her. She sighs, a frustrated puff of air through her nose, and turns to her phone instead. _Don't try to climb that. You'll break your neck._

As she watches, Bellamy pulls out his phone and glances at the screen. Then he takes a few steps away from the house, tilts his head all the way back, and stares up at her window. She can't discern his expression from this distance and in this light, but she imagines that he's considering. She watches him look down at his phone again and start typing.  

_thenn what am i supposed to do?_

_Go away_ is one obvious option, which nevertheless never seriously occurs to her. 

_Come around to the front. I'll let you in. Just be quiet okay my parents are here._

Bellamy slips his phone back into his pocket, then flashes her an exaggerated two thumbs up. It's kind of a dorky thing to do, and Clarke stays at her post even after he's disappeared around the corner of the house, wondering if she'd only just imagined it. 

Then she pulls herself together and rushes from her room, down the stairs, into the front hall, and starts unlocking the door in a disorienting rush of déjà vu. When she finally pulls it open, as carefully and as quietly as she can, she finds Bellamy already standing on the other side, leaning against the door frame with a practiced casual attitude. As if he'd been waiting an age for her to come. His hair is ruffled and unusually unkempt and his gaze is jumpy, his eyes a little bleary and distant, even when he forces them to focus on her. As soon as he breaks his pose, uncrosses one ankle from the other and tries to stand up straight without the wall to help him, he sways a little, blown around like the bare limbs of a tree in a breeze of his own making. 

Clarke narrows her eyes at him. He's drunk, is what it is. Maybe not very drunk but he's definitely turned the corner past tipsy and this, she realizes now, explains a lot. But if anything it's even harder now to turn him away. 

"Come on, come inside," she says, pitching her voice just above a whisper, and guides him over the threshold with her arm looped through his arm. Right away, it's obvious that he doesn't need the help—he couldn't walk a straight line, but he's not exactly falling down on his face—but he doesn't pull away and neither does she. Partially, she's embarrassed by her miscalculation. But also she just likes the strong hint of muscles underneath his jacket and how close they have to stand, especially as they take the turn on the narrow staircase. He smells like night air and smoke. 

Halfway down the hall, Bellamy stumbles too far to the left, over nothing but his own feet as far as Clarke can tell, and bumps his shoulder hard into the wall. Clarke winces. For a moment, just a second, but long enough to send a jolt of adrenaline through her heart, she’s absolutely certain that her parents are about to poke their heads out of their door. When nothing happens, she breathes out hard through her nose and mutters, “This is the _last_ time I’m letting you into my house.” 

“Don’t worry so much, Griffin,” he murmurs back to her, and just as the pain of a stubbed toe fades almost as quickly as it first burst forth, her burst of panic flares out, too. 

Still, she reminds him, “My parents are just down the hall,” as they turn into her bedroom and he pulls away from her at last. 

Bellamy waves the warning aside, twirls backward on his heel with a surprising bit of grace, and lets himself fall onto her bed. The springs squeak under his weight but at least he keeps his feet on the floor. A layer of dirt and grass cakes the thick soles of his boots. "I know, I know," he answers. "I'll be quiet." He pulls himself up onto the pillows and crosses his arms behind his head. "Very quiet. I promise." 

Clarke just hums briefly in reply, a short and skeptical warning that she doesn’t entirely mean, and quietly closes her bedroom door behind them. She crosses the room, pulls out her desk chair, and sits down. She has no idea what she's doing and just hopes he doesn't notice. 

"I like your room," Bellamy says. He’s staring at the painting she made of the ocean two summers ago, during a family vacation in Maine, the one she liked so much that she hung it up next to her closet door as soon as they got home. “It’s very…blue—” 

“Bellamy, why are you here?” 

The question has been building up in her ever since she read his first text, but something in the appraising way he looks at her artwork, at the top of her dresser with its assortment of mismatched earrings and hair ties, at the throw rug on her floor, finally triggers it forth. This is too weird. It’s too weird and unsettling that he’s here, in her room, in the middle of the night. On her bed. He looks too out of place, rough and wild against the gentle blues of her bedspread and the off-white of her pillowcases.  

And maybe, she can admit, it's a little bit thrilling, not just because it's late and he shouldn't be here, and she barely even knows him anyway, and nothing like this has ever happened to her before, but because he's _Bellamy_. And he _is_ a little wild, and sharp, and strange, and she doesn't really get him, but she wants to. 

He flops his head over to the side, slowly, and stares at her. She can see all the gears turning in his head, her question rolling over and over in his brain. "Because I can't go home," he says, finally. "And _not_ for the reasons you think." 

The last words sound hard as a threat but Clarke can’t parse them. She wasn’t thinking a thing. She was still stuck on the part of the evening where she acknowledges his mere presence in her space. 

All she can do is stare at him, blinking slowly, until his pointed warning glare softens, shading into confusion and perhaps embarrassment, as whatever argument he was expecting never comes. Then she asks, "Why can't you go home?" She means to sound gentle and comforting but comes off mostly curious, and a dash puzzled.  

Bellamy grunts, and turns his gaze up to the ceiling. In the awkward movements of his shoulders, she reads a strong desire to shrug her question off entirely, and she wonders if he's regretting showing up beneath her window. "Because," he answers, fuzzy-voiced and reluctant, to her overhead light. "Can't let O see me like this."  

Clarke raises her eyebrows. "So you go hide out at her best friend's house instead? Oh, yes." She nods sagely. "Makes perfect sense."  

"Hey." He turns to looks at her again, sharply, or as much so as he can manage, and points a vaguely accusing finger her way. "Hey. Don’t—just—you keep this between us." He doesn't sound especially menacing, and if the circumstances were different, or if Clarke were different, less attuned to the groundswell of anticipation building up inside her lungs, she might have laughed aloud at the attempted threat. She must at least look skeptical, though, because Bellamy adds, "I'm serious."  

He doesn't use words like _secret_ or _promise_ , and his gaze is a bit too unfocused to relay any message itself, but still Clarke feels like she might as well be taking a blood oath.  

"Does Octavia at least know you're okay?" she asks. Feeling out the edges of the morality here, before she makes any commitments.  

"Yeah. I told her I'd be out late. Not to worry."  

He sighs, then, and the urgency leaves his tone and deflates from his shoulders. Bellamy, in his intoxicated state, clearly has the attention span of a child. He starts to move his legs oddly, and after a long, uncertain moment, Clarke realizes that he's trying to take off his boots using just his feet. And that really makes her roll her eyes.  

"Here," she sighs, to echo him, but more long-suffering, and crosses over to the far side of the bed to undo his laces for him. She has this image in her head of him kicking mud and grass onto the edge of her bedspread, and of what her mother would say if she were to notice—Clarke always leaves her shoes on the mat by the front door. This favor is about self-survival but still feels disquietingly intimate. It's quite possible that Bellamy is staring at her. "Look, you can stay here, okay, but you know the rules. My parents can't know and you have to leave—"  

"Early," he finishes, smiling at her sideways, as if this really were something illicit that they did all the time. Instead of just the one time, and now this other time, a couple of odd flukes. Clarke gets to her feet again and dusts off her hands, and tries not to overthink what has just happened, which is that she has, accidentally, invited him to spend the whole night.  

"Thanks," he says, belatedly, and pulls his feet up onto the bed.  

She shrugs. "You're welcome."  

Bellamy's socks are light gray and there is a hole in the left one, through which his big toe has started to poke through. She still has so many questions. Like:  

"Are you going to tell me _why_ you were drinking?"  

"Nope." He starts to shift toward the middle of the bed, grimacing when something pokes at him beneath his shoulder blade—her sci fi adventure, which he pulls out from underneath him and looks at quizzically. "Nothing much to tell. Is this yours?" 

Yeah, her Friday night guilty pleasure reading, not something she wants Bellamy Blake getting his hands on. It's not the most embarrassing thing in the world, true, but the way he's holding it up above his head and starting to flip through its pages, so casually, as if the small secrets of her life inspired the lightest and most easily satisfied of curiosities, somehow makes her feel terribly exposed. She sits down, unconsciously prim, on the edge of her own bed. 

"Yeah. Who else do you think is leaving books in my room?" 

She is not bothered. She is cool and unbothered and Bellamy Blake is not lying on her bed and she is lying to herself.  

"Huh," he says, as if she'd made a truly thought-provoking point. The corner of his mouth curls up. "So’s it good?" 

"It's good. If you like vintage science fiction about space travel."  

"Griffin,” he answers, turning to her with put upon gravity, “that is my _favorite_ type of book."  

Clarke smiles at that, despite herself. Then she lies back against the pillows, slowly, treating her body like a fragile thing and its placement on the mattress as a careful operation, measuring out in millimeters the safest distance between them. Slowly she is coming to terms with this new knowledge, that not only is Bellamy in her room but she is in bed next to him, and when it's finally set and settled in her brain, she turns to him again. He's staring at the spaceship on the cover of her book as if it utterly fascinated him, running his fingers over its outline, entranced. This is what Bellamy is like when he's drunk, Clarke thinks idly: impulsive, open, a little bit silly, lacking in self-consciousness and, she gets the feeling, in duplicity. 

This is probably why she finds herself asking, without thinking, "Bellamy"—at his name he glances up, catches her gaze with an open look that verges on surprise, but it's too late to hold the question back—"how did you get into that fight?" 

He stares at her for a long time before he answers, but doesn't try to pretend he doesn't understand. 

"O didn't tell you?" 

"No." 

As if she would. As if a Blake sibling would break a Blake family confidence. The closest Clarke even came to asking her was their short conversation that Monday before French; Octavia knows how to make it clear without words that certain topics are forbidden, and this, Clarke could tell, was clearly one. Maybe it is with Bellamy too. He looks down at the spaceship again and doesn't say anything more for an awkwardly long stretch, long enough for Clarke to convince herself she'd crossed an invisible line.  

Then finally: "We were hanging out in Eligius Park." 

"Eligius?" 

"Yeah, it's on the south side, near—" 

"I know. I know it." 

She knows where it is, yeah, has even been a few times. Probably not since middle school, though, when she and Raven watched the Fourth of July fireworks from the top of the hill by the gate. That was before she started at Arkadia High and learned the full scope of the park's reputation: after school and especially after dark, a place to go for under the table exchanges and no strings hook ups, a meeting spot for people with no other place to meet. Now it has a certain association in her mind, equal parts intriguing and unsavory, and this is something perhaps that Bellamy hears in her voice or sees in her face, because he shoots her a look that might be a challenge, and waits a long moment before he starts again. 

"Yeah, so...we were hanging out by the pond, a bunch of us from Arkadia and some people from...Trishana High, I think?" His brow furrows, and she tries to imagine it: Bellamy slouching on one of the park benches, smiling an easy, broad smile, confident and open. The opposite of how he is now, quiet and thoughtful. "I didn't really know them... One of them kept flirting with Roma and she kept pushing him off. Then he started...talking all this shit about her." A flare of anger makes him grip the paperback hard as if, for a second, he wanted to tear it in two. "Her _reputation_." He spits out the word, scowls at its bad taste.  

"So—you beat him up?" 

Bellamy turns to her again, this time slightly startled, like he'd forgotten her presence entirely in his hazy state. "Yeah," he says, slowly, the rest of the story distilled to just that: "I beat him up." He sounds neither proud nor embarrassed nor defensive, only matter of fact. "I told him that wasn't a nice way to talk about my friend and he...told me to mind my own business..." He sets Clarke's book down on her bedside table, then—her breath catches—turns on his side, facing her. It is a startlingly intimate posture, because her bed is narrow, and if she were to mirror him they would be lying face to face and almost touching. 

"Is that what you wanted to know?" he asks. His voice is too quiet for accusation, a little blurred and bleary. 

It is, pretty much. Though knowing only opens up more questions, more mysteries. 

Like why he's here, really. Why he's not crashing at the house of one of his actual friends, why he chose her, why he's with her in her bed. 

She could try to ask, but he wouldn't answer. 

"Yeah," she answers, "mystery solved." She offers a little smile, as she wonders if it's safe to rest her arm along her side. Instead, she folds her hands on top of her stomach. "That was—chivalrous of you, Bellamy." She stumbles on his name, almost calls him _Blake_ but can't do it, sure he'll see at last that this, this nonchalance, this casual air, is all an act. 

He just hums, a fuzzy sound between consideration and a scoff, and looks down at the inch of bedspread between them. She can see his eyelashes, the trembling movement of them as he blinks. She’s never noticed another person’s eyelashes before.

"Chivalrous," he mumbles, thoughtful and low. 

_Yeah_ , Clarke thinks. Almost _gallant_. Also stupid and excessive, the unchecked instinct of a boy with too much anger stored up in him, a young man too familiar with violence, and possessing not quite enough self-control. What had Octavia said about him? That he wasn't proud of the things he did, but he always had to defend someone's honor?  

_Sure._ (And what if he sat up, now, leaned up on his elbow and looked at her, rested his hand against her cheek, drew her in?) _Sounds about right._

(What if he kissed her?) 

He doesn't say anything more, and in the silence, Clarke slowly rearranges herself. She curls up onto her side, too, and watches him. His eyes fix sometimes on her face, sometimes at a spot over her shoulder, fall sometimes down to look at their hands. One of his is splayed against the bedspread. She's tucked her arms beneath her head, wrapped around her pillow. 

(He'd close the distance nice and slow, tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear as he stared into her eyes, serious and sweet, and when his gaze flicked down to her lips then she'd know that he wanted to, really wanted her, and she'd give a little nod and smile at him, soft and wanting, and then he'd kiss her, at last, his palm warm against her neck and his fingers sliding up across her jaw, as she ran her own hands up his chest, feeling how solid it was and how strong—) 

Her pulse is jumping in her throat.  

His eyes are starting to close. 

"Bellamy," she says, sharp enough to get his attention again. His eyelids snap back up. "Remember: early tomorrow." 

"Mmm, yeah." He taps his temple with one finger. "Got it. Don't worry." 

There's no way he has it. Clarke rolls her eyes, and gets up carefully to grab her phone again. She sets an early alarm, and then leaves it on top of the book on her nightstand. Turns off all the lights. Bites her lip hard, thinking. 

But there's no way she's going to sleep on her own floor, not with the sweet longing taste of those fantasies still flooding her tongue. She pulls back the blankets slowly and slides into bed, this time with her back to him. 

"Goodnight, Bellamy," she says, even though she's half-certain he's already fallen asleep, and when his sleepy, gruff voice murmurs, "Goodnight, Griffin," back at her, she can't help smiling, soft, and half-hiding her face in her pillow. She is nervous and thrilled, uncertain and excited, in too deep for sure, or maybe just on the edge of something—she doesn't know. But she rolls those words over and over in her mind ( _Goodnight, Griffin; Goodnight, Griffin_ ), like a mantra, like hypnosis, until she finally falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I went back and forth a lot on whether this should be a one-shot, part of a universe of one-shots, or the start of a multi-part fic. And I was almost set on option 2, since I have no extended plan for this story whatsoever, but honestly it just reads more like the introduction to a longer work, so that's how I'm presenting it.
> 
> If you enjoyed this ridiculous morass of exaggerated high school cliches and would like to read more, please comment and let me know!
> 
> And/or say hello on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/).


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